Organic Universe

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Scientists have discovered that our
solar system is very unique. Earth is located in a star system that is
by no means the norm in space. As a matter of fact, our solar system
appears to be the exception. A stunning exception, in the way it’s laid
out to actually foster the very conditions on Earth which makes life
possible. In the universe at large, chaos, explosions, and mind-bending
collisions between massive celestial bodies appear to be commonplace.
After you watch this video, you may never see our little blue planet
quite the same again.

Something is up with the sun. It has begun to behave very
erratically, and scientists don’t know quite what to make of it.
Sunspot activity appears to be slowing down with each new cycle and
absolutely gigantic holes have started to appear in the sun. At the
moment, the sun is approaching the peak of its 11 year cycle, and an
increasing number of scientists are becoming concerned about what the
next cycle will bring. If sunspot activity continues to diminish, could
the sunspot cycle eventually die altogether? Is it possible that we
could be approaching another ice age? Even worse, could the
increasingly erratic behavior of the sun be an indication that the sun
is dying? Traditionally, scientists have taught that the sun won’t die
until billions of years from now, but in recent years astronomers have
observed stars similar to our own sun suddenly begin to behave very
erratically and then rapidly die. Is it possible that the same thing
could happen to our sun?

It is a fact that the current solar cycle has been the weakest in 100 years. This has many scientists searching for answers…

The Sun is acting weird. It typically puts on a pageant
of magnetic activity every 11 years for aurora watchers and sungazers
alike, but this time it overslept. When it finally woke up (a year late), it gave the weakest performance in 100 years.

What’s even weirder is that scientists, who aren’t usually shy about
tossing hypotheses about, are at a loss for a good explanation.

Of course most scientists insist that everything is going to be okay
and that we don’t have a thing to be worried about, but others are not
so sure.

Penn offered another, more catastrophic option: the sunspot cycle might die altogether.
His team uses sunspot spectra to measure their magnetic fields, and his
data show a clear trend: the magnetic field strength in sunspots is
waning.

“If this trend continues, there will be almost no spots in Cycle 25,
and we might be going into another Maunder Minimum,” Penn states. The
first Maunder Minimum occurred during the second half of the 17th
century. Almost no spots were seen on the Sun during this time, which
coincided with Europe’s Little Ice Age.

Another strange phenomenon that astronomers are watching closely is
the appearance of absolutely massive holes in the sun. Just recently, a
massive hole that covered nearly a fourth of the entire surface of the sun made headlines all over the globe…

A space telescope aimed at the sun has spotted a gigantic
hole in the solar atmosphere — a dark spot that covers nearly a quarter
of our closest star, spewing solar material and gas into space.

The so-called coronal hole over the sun’s north pole came into view
between July 13 and 18 and was observed by the Solar and Heliospheric
Observatory, or SOHO. NASA released a video of the sun hole as seen by the SOHO spacecraft, showing the region as a vast dark spot surrounded by solar activity.

In addition, as I mentioned in a previous article,
we seem to be witnessing an increase in the number of earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions along “the Ring of Fire” this year. Recent examples
include New Zealand, Peru and Japan.

Does all of this have anything to do with the activity of the sun?

Some people think so.

And what does all of this mean for the future of the United States? In my new novel,
there is a major earthquake along the New Madrid fault line and a major
volcanic eruption on the west coast. I included those disasters in my
book for a reason. Many believe that major earth changes are on the
way, and many believe that the sun will play a major role in those earth
changes.

Also, could it be possible that the activity of the sun has something to do with the mysterious hum that people are hearing all over the globe?…

It creeps in slowly in the dark of night, and once inside, it almost never goes away.

It’s known as the Hum, a steady, droning sound that’s heard in places
as disparate as Taos, N.M.; Bristol, England; and Largs, Scotland.

But what causes the Hum, and why it only affects a small percentage
of the population in certain areas, remain a mystery, despite a number
of scientific investigations.

Nobody really knows the answer, but we shouldn’t be afraid to ask these kinds of questions.

The truth is that at some point our sun is going to die. Virtually
everyone agrees on that. The following is from an article posted on scienceblogs.com…

The fact that the Sun, our Sun, the bringer of warmth,
light, energy, and the sustaining force of all life on this planet,
isn’t going to shine forever. Quite to the contrary, someday, the Sun
will die in a fiery, catastrophic explosion, one which will quite
possibly obliterate our entire planet, and then eventually cease to
shine at all.

Most scientists believe that we are still “billions of years” away
from that happening, but not everyone agrees. And when our sun does
die, it is likely going to look something like this…

Basically, the sun’s chemical make up will cause it to
grow twice as bright and twice as big as it is now, thus increasing
Earth’s temperature from a mean of 68 degrees Fahrenheit to 167 degrees
Fahrenheit and completely obliterating our planet’s oceans. That’s just
the start.

Eventually, the sun will increase to a size 166 times larger than it
is now, and literally melt Earth’s mountains, creating a planet
dominated by flowing lava. As the sun grows bigger, its atmosphere will
be shot off into space, pushing everything around it further away. Once
that period ends, and once the sun basically runs out of fuel, it’ll
approach the end of its cycle, and actually increase even more to 180
times the size it is now while also becoming thousands of times
brighter.

Could it be possible that our sun is in the very early stages of
shutting down already? There are some people out there that are
absolutely convinced that our sun is using up it’s hydrogen fuel at a
much faster rate than previously believed. And there are some people
out there that are absolutely convinced that once the hydrogen gets down
to a certain level that it will set off a chain reaction that will
ultimately lead to the death of our sun.

So how soon could that happen? Is it possible that the sun is rapidly running out of time?

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Americans still reeling from the collapse of the U.S.
housing market and who lost homes or tens of thousands of dollars in
equity are going to be especially upset by news that one of the lenders
at the heart of the collapse, Bank of America, is guilty of fleecing
borrowers and rewarding foreclosures.

According to BoA
employees-turned-whistleblowers who have signed sworn statements
attesting to the validity of their accusations, "Bank of America
employees regularly lied to homeowners seeking loan modifications,
denied their applications for made-up reasons, and were rewarded for
sending homeowners to foreclosure," investigative journal ProPublica is reporting.

The
statements were filed in mid-June in a Boston federal court as part of a
multi-state class-action lawsuit brought by homeowners who attempted to
avoid foreclosure via the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a
government program, but say their cases were botched by BoA.

Homeowners denied en masse

As expected, BoA is officially denying any wrongdoing, with a spokesman telling ProPublica
that to a person, the former employees' claims are "rife with factual
inaccuracies," adding that the bank planned to address the accusations
more fully in July.

The spokesman, who was not identified by
name, went on to say that BoA was responsible for modifying more loans
than any other U.S. bank, and that the financial institution is
continuing to "demonstrate our commitment to assisting customers who are
at risk of foreclosure."

A half dozen former employees actually
worked for BoA, while one worked for a contractor. "They range from
former managers to front-line employees, and all dealt with homeowners
seeking to avoid foreclosure through the government's program," ProPublica reported.

When
HAMP was launched by the Obama Administration in 2009, the housing
collapse was still ravaging the U.S. economy and homeowners. At the
time, BoA was, by far, the largest mortgage servicing institution in the
program, with twice as many loans eligible as the next largest
institution.

According to the former employees, BoA - besieged
with a rush of panicked homeowners - the bank would often either mislead
them or deny their applications for bogus reasons.

William
Wilson, Jr., an underwriter and manager for BoA from 2010 to 2012, said
at times large groups of homeowners were denied at once via a procedure
called a "blitz." Per Pro Publica:

As part of the
modification applications, homeowners were required to send in documents
with their financial information. About twice a month, Wilson said, the
bank ordered that all files with documentation 60 or more days old
simply be denied.

"During a blitz, a single team would
decline between 600 and 1,500 modification files at a time," he said in
his sworn statement. In order to justify such mass denials, employees
devised fictitious reasons for the rejections, such as claiming that the
homeowner had not filed the appropriate paperwork when they really had.

Mass denials like these may also have occurred at other financial institutions, the report said.

Chris Wyatt, formerly of Goldman Sachs subsidiary Litton Loan Servicing, told Pro Publica
last year that the firm sometimes conducted "denial sweeps" of
applicants, to reduce backlogs. At the time, a Goldman Sachs
spokesperson denied Wyatt's claims but offered nothing to refute him.

Still 'too big to fail'

Of the whistleblowers, five said they were encouraged to mislead customers.

"We
were told to lie to customers and claim that Bank of America had not
received documents it had requested," said Simone Gordon, an senior
collector at the bank from 2007 until early 2012. "We were told that
admitting that the Bank received documents 'would open a can of worms,'"
she added, noting that BoA was required to underwrite applications
within 30 days of receiving homeowners' documents, but that the bank did
not have adequate staff for the task.

Abby Martin goes over the case of Katie Barnett, an Ohio resident who
had her home mistaken for one that was foreclosed. Bank thugs robbed and
ransacked Barnett's home yet is refusing to pay for the damages. Sadly,
her case is far from uncommon.

By all rights, we should be in the throes of a solar maximum, an 11-year peak where the Sun is at its most active and dappled with sunspots.

Thus far though, Solar Cycle #24 has been off to a sputtering start,
and researchers that attended the meeting of the American Astronomical
Society's Solar Physics Division earlier this month are divided as to
why."Not only is this the smallest cycle we've seen in the space age, it's the smallest cycle in 100 years," NASA/Marshall
Space Flight Center research scientist David Hathaway said during a
recent press teleconference conducted by the Marshall Space Flight
Center.

Cycle #23 gave way to a profound minimum that saw a spotless Sol on 260 out of 365 days (71%!) in 2009.
Then, #Cycle 24 got off to a late start, about a full year overdue - we
should have seen a solar maximum in 2012, and now that's on track for
the late 2013 to early 2014 time frame. For solar observers, both
amateur, professional and automated, its seems as if the Sun exhibits a
"split-personality" this year, displaying its active Cycle #24-self one
week, only to sink back into a blank despondency the next.

This new cycle has also been asymmetrical as well.
One hallmark heralding the start of a new cycle is the appearance of
sunspots at higher solar latitudes on the disk of the Sun. These move
progressively toward the Sun's equatorial regions as the cycle
progresses, and can be mapped out in what's known as a Spörer's Law.

But the northern hemisphere of the Sun has been much more active since
2006, with the southern hemisphere experiencing a lag in activity.
"Usually this asymmetry lasts a year or so, and then the hemispheres
synchronize," said Giuliana de Toma of the High Altitude Observatory.

So far, several theories have been put forth as to why our tempestuous
star seems to be straying from its usual self. Along with the standard
11-year cycle, it's thought that there may be a longer, 100 year trend
of activity and subsidence known as the Gleissberg Cycle.

The Sun is a giant ball of gas, rotating faster (25 days) at the equator
than at the poles, which rotate once every 34.5 days. This dissonance
sets up a massive amount of torsion, causing the magnetic field lines to
stretch and snap, releasing massive amounts of energy. The Sun also
changes polarity with every sunspot cycle, another indication that a new
cycle is underway.

But predictions have run the gamut for Cycle #24. Recently, solar scientists have projected a twin peaked solar maximum
for later this year, and thus far, Sol seems to be following this
modified trend. Initial predictions by scientists at the start of Cycle
#24 was for the sunspot number
to have reached 90 by August 2013; but here it is the end of July, and
we're sitting at 68, and it seems that we'll round out the northern
hemisphere Summer at a sunspot number of 70 or so.

Some researchers predict that the following sunspot Cycle #25 may even be absent all together.

"If this trend continues, there will be almost no spots in Cycle 25," Noted Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory, hinting that we may be on the edge of another Maunder Minimum.

The Maunder Minimum
was a period from 1645 to 1715 where almost no sunspots were seen. This
span of time corresponded to a medieval period known as the Little Ice
Age. During this era, the Thames River in London froze, making Christmas
"Frost Fairs" possible on the ice covered river. Several villages in
the Swiss Alps were also consumed by encroaching glaciers, and the
Viking colony established in Greenland perished. The name for the period
comes from Edward Maunder, who first noted the minimum in papers
published in the 1890s. The term came into modern vogue after John Eddy
published a paper on the subject in the journal of Science in
1976. Keep in mind, the data from the period covered by the Maunder
Minimum is far from complete - Galileo had only started sketching
sunspots via projection only a few decades prior to the start of the
Maunder Minimum. But tellingly, there was a span of time in the early 18th century when many researchers supposed that sunspots were a myth! They were really THAT infrequent...

Just what roll a pause in the solar cycle might play in the climate
change debate remains to be seen. Perhaps, humanity is getting a brief
(and lucky) reprieve, a chance to get serious about controlling our own
destiny and doing something about anthropogenic climate-forcing. On a
more ominous note, however, an extended cooling phase may give us reason
to stall on preparing for the the inevitable, while giving ammunition
to deniers, who like to site natural trends exclusively.

Whatever occurs, we now have an unprecedented fleet of solar monitoring
spacecraft on hand to watch the solar drama unfold. STEREO A & B
afford us a 360 degree view of the Sun. SOHO has now monitored the Sun
for the equivalent of more than one solar cycle, and NASA's Solar
Dynamics Observatory has joined it in its scrutiny. NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph
(IRIS) just launched earlier this year, and has already begun returning
views of the solar atmosphere in unprecedented detail. Even spacecraft
such as MESSENGER orbiting Mercury can give us vital data from other
vantage points in the solar system.

Cycle #24 may be a lackluster performer, but I'll bet the Sun has a few
surprises in store. You can always get a freak cloud burst, even in the
middle of a drought. Plus, we're headed towards northern hemisphere
Fall, a time when aurora activity traditionally picks up.

Be sure to keep a (safely filtered) eye on ol' Sol - it may be the case over these next few years that "no news is big news!"

Water samples taken at an underground passage below the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear power plant contain alarming levels of radiation which
are comparable to those taken immediately after the catastrophe.

According to a Saturday statement by Tokyo Electric Power Company
(TEPCO), the tested water contains 2.35 billion becquerels of
cesium per liter, and the radioactive water is now seeping into
the sea. The findings were also evident from samples taken within
a 50-meter radius around the plant.

TEPCO’s specialists have hit a wall trying to solve the problem
of the leaking groundwater, which has persisted since 2011.
However, unlike then, they cannot tell what the source of the
newfound radioactivity is. The current explanation is that the
radioactive water that had been left in the underground trench
some two years ago is now mixing with the groundwater, which is
in turn contaminating the sea.

The current investigation started back in May, when specialists
registered a 17-fold hike in radiation levels compared to
December 2012. More tests immediately followed.

In July, scientists found high tritium levels – 20 per cent
higher than just two months before. At the beginning of the
month, cesium levels also went up by an astonishing 22 per cent
from the previous day. The legal limit of 90 becquerels per liter
was exceeded by around 22,000 becquerels.

On July 10, scientists warned about possible sea contamination,
although they had no evidence at the time.

On Monday, however, TEPCO discovered that radiation levels were
rising and falling together with the tide. This has led them to
their latest theory - that the leftover trench water from 2011 is
indeed mixing with the underground water that flows straight into
the Pacific.

The only theoretical solution at this point is to build a wall of
liquid glass between the nuclear reactors and the sea, siphoning
off contaminated water from the underground trench.

Steam has also been seen emerging from one of the damaged
reactors on three occasions, sparking further fears about the
state of the wrecked plant.

Meanwhile, TEPCO has had to sustain bad publicity after it was
revealed that it delayed publishing the summer study which
sparked these newfound fears - which were realized just days
after TEPCO reassured the public that the water was safely
enclosed. The government has labeled the company’s behavior as
“deplorable.”

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Archeologists have
discovered a lunar calendar in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, that is nearly
ten thousand years old. Their findings show that the calendar makers (1)
thought about time and (2) figured out a means to follow it at a period
in history that was still in the Stone Age. The discovery is considered
both surprising and important because it now places a calendar nearly
five thousand years before what was previously considered as the first
formal calendar, created in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. But here, a
discovery has been made of a calendar construct appearing to track the
phases of the moon nearly 10,000 years ago.

Scientists are now
calling this discovery in Scotland that seems to mimic the phases of the
moon to track lunar months the world's oldest known calendar.

"What we are looking at here is a very important step in humanity's
earliest formal construction of time, even the start of history itself,"
said Vincent Gaffney, professor of landscape archaeology at Birmingham
University, who led the team who analyzed the pits and their functions.

Also referred to as the "Warren Field calendar," referring to the
land area in Aberdeenshire where the calendar was found, the discovery
consists of an array of 12 pits and arc. They appear to represent the
phases of the moon, going from waxing and waning to central arc,
corresponding to the lunar months of the year.

However, said Prof. Gaffney, because the lunar year does not
correspond to the natural year, the sequence had to be calibrated
annually, and the site seems to align along the midwinter solstice,
indicating that each year it was calibrated, and kept good time.

The experts believe the site dates back to around 8000 BC. Gaffney
and team in their paper on the subject observed that the site "also
aligns on the south east horizon and a prominent topographic point
associated with sunrise on the midwinter solstice. In doing so the
monument anticipates problems associated with simple lunar calendars by
providing an annual astronomic correction in order to maintain the link
between the passage of time indicated by the Moon, the asynchronous
solar year, and the associated seasons."

Although previously excavated back in 2005, geophysical survey teams
from several universities have been working to map the sites again and
to look for further features. The Warren Field site was first discovered
as unusual crop marks spotted from the air by the Royal Commission on
the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS).

The pit-creators are identified as a Mesolithic group, referring to a
group of cultures between Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The three
"lithics" belong to the Stone Age, and the Mesolithic were a transition
group who succeeded in adapting to a collecting and fishing as well as
hunting economy The question remains, why did these hunter gatherers
track the phases of the moon? For hunting purposes? To explore celestial
bodies?

One theory comes from project member, Dr Christopher Gaffney, Archeological Science at the University of Bradford:

"For pre-historic hunter-gatherer communities, knowing what food
resources were available at different times of the year was crucial to
survival. These communities relied on hunting migrating animals and the
consequences of missing these events were potential starvation. They
needed to carefully note the seasons to be prepared for when that food
resource passed through, so from this perspective, our interpretation of
this site as a seasonal calendar makes sense."

Friday, July 26, 2013

Pam Warhurst tells how she and her community decided to
start a revolution by growing food in public spaces. They didn’t
consult. They didn’t write reports. They didn’t ask for permission. They
just did it.

In just a short time, their town became a lush garden,
full of food-growing plants. Almost everyone can be involved, and after
awhile, almost everyone wants to be involved. That’s the power of people
doing something for themselves. Nothing can stop us!

Pam Warhurst is thoroughly entertaining as she explains how they did it—and how you can, too! [13:22]

“Sustainability” is one of the key phrases used to
justify this huge consolidation, not just of populations, but of power.
But who elected regional planners to redesign the nation? No one, that’s
who.

In Central Texas, vast authority was handed over to an organization called CAPCOG, the Capital Area Council of Governments,
which is comprised of appointed leaders and which overseas a number of
key development projects related to transportation, housing, zoning,
economic re-development and etc. Similar organizations – lacking elected
leaders, sufficient accountability or even general public awareness –
exist across the nation.

As Melissa Melton previously reported,
for Austin, as in other locales, this includes implementation of the
“smart grid,” the adoption of international building codes, control over
thermostat data, greater emphasis on mixed-use building structures,
more multifamily units, and the like.

As a growing metropolitan city, Austin stands out as a prime example,
in fact. Not only has Austin received HUD Sustainable Communities
grants, but it has been designated by ICLEI-Local Governments for
Sustainability USA (who have been integral since 1992 in the
implementation of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 goals) as one of ten STAR Beta Communities across the United States. Emblematic of this is the Mueller Community, which has been developed by regional planners to incorporate the sanitized, vision of a ‘sustainable urban’ Stepford Wives lifestyle in an ‘advanced smart grid’ model.

Unlike the East Coast, Texas is mostly new to super dense population
zones. While buses exist, trains are sparse even in Houston and Dallas,
and few are accustomed to mass transportation as a way of life. But with
the politically shady imposition of toll roads, light rail (a taxpayer
funded inner-city rail scheme) and an attempt to link urban living with “emerging Megaregions” like the “Texas Triangle,” that is changing.

For years, I passed by the Plaza Saltillo Metro Rail stop
just a few blocks East of the famed 6th Street downtown area vibrant
with the city’s night life and plenty of intoxicated patrons who could
probably use a lift. But never have I seen anyone waiting at that rail
station, day or night. And over the course of years, I never spotted the
actual train – not once. Did it even exist?

I never got a direct answer to that rhetorical question floating
around in my head, but I was delayed in my (rather despicable)
automobile travel activities by a related end just a few weeks ago.

It was rush hour on North Lamar, and things were already busy and
stressful on the road. The rail road barriers came down and things came
to grinding halt. I assumed a freight train was hauling through and I
wondered how many cars it would be and how long it would take. Instead,
for a solid two or three minutes nothing at all came by.

Still the barriers impeded the busy flow of traffic. But nothing. It
was another minute, maybe even two before the train finally crossed over
what is a major road through the city of Austin.

When it finally came, the train was not a freighter hauling
industrial products or commercial goods, but a two car metro rail
‘train’. Little had I noticed that over in the corner was a station
dubbed Crestview,
officially ‘west of Lamar between Justin St. and St. John’s Ave.’ And
as surely as I was eager to get moving on those taxpayer roads, I
realized that no one – not a soul – was visibly in that train. Not one
passenger, yet the metro rail stop had blocked hundreds of cars for a
full 4 or maybe even 5 minutes.

Is that outrageous? Or just what Texans can expect to face in coming
years, along with higher taxes to cover new infrastructure and a fresh push for more trains and toll roads
(encircling cities like Austin and typically built on top of, or taking
over, taxpayer-funded roads), alongside the literal rise of dozens of
new skyscrapers, and more and more “mixed use” buildings that include
trendy shops, overpriced condos short on floor space, and a growing
population of metro-minded dupes.

Subways and trains make plenty of sense in New York City and other
East Coast metro areas, and quite a few European cities I’ve visited,
however briefly. But this kind of transition in Texas and other areas of
heartland America will not come without significant growing pains,
plenty of cost, and a drastic but understated loss of sovereignty.

Again, all this ‘concentrated growth’ is sold in the name of
“sustainability” or protecting the environment. But consider for one
moment what would happen in the event of economic collapse, civil
unrest, food shortages, natural disasters/terror attacks, or even
temporary shortages (for whatever reason). The biggest cities in the
country would quickly become the worst possible places to be.
Statistically, the average home only holds a few days worth of food
before they run out, while grocery stores hold only a three or four days worth of food. Electricity outages or the like could potentially cause panic even quicker than food.

Without going into all the details, that picture should get across
one simple concept: an urban zone like this is not “sustainable” in any
real sense.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Abby Martin talks to Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's energy
program, about the dangerous side effects of fracking, and whether or
not supporters of the practice are right about hydraulic fracturing
being a good alternative to dirty energy.

Honey bees are quickly disappearing from the US – a phenomenon that
has left scientists baffled. But new research shows that bees exposed to
common agricultural chemicals while pollinating US crops are less
likely to resist a parasitic infection.

As a result of chemical exposure, honey bees are more likely to
succumb to the lethal Nosema ceranae parasite and die from
the resulting complications.

Scientists from the University of Maryland and the US Department
of Agriculture on Wednesday published a study that linked chemicals, including
fungicides, to the mass
die-offs. Scientists have long struggled to find the cause
behind the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which an estimated
10 million beehives at an average value of $200 each have been
lost since 2006.

Last winter, the honey bee population declined by 31.1 percent,
with some beekeepers reporting losses of 90 to 100 percent of
their bee populations. Scientists are concerned that
“Beemageddon” could cause the collapse of the $200 billion
agriculture industry, since more than 100 US crops rely on honey
bees to pollinate them.

The new findings are key in determining one of the causes of the
CCD, but they fail to explain why entire beehives sometimes die
at once.

UMD and DOA researchers found that pollen samples in fields
ranging from Delaware to Maine contained nine different
agricultural chemicals, including fungicides, herbicides,
insecticides and miticides. One particular sample even contained
21 different agricultural chemicals. To test their theory, they
fed pesticide-ridden pollen samples to healthy bees and then
infected them with the parasite. They found that the pesticides
hindered the bees’ abilities to resist the infection, thus
contributing to their deaths. The fungicide chlorothalonil was
particularly damaging, tripling the risks of parasitic
infection.

“We don’t think of fungicides as having a negative effect on
bees, because they’re not designed to kill insects,” Dennis
vanEngelsdorp, the study’s senior author, said in a news release.

He explained that federal regulations restrict the use of
insecticides while pollinators are foraging, but noted that
“there are no such restrictions on fungicides, so you’ll often
see fungicide applications going on while bees are foraging on
the crop. The finding suggests that we have to reconsider that
policy.”

Bees are declining at such a fast rate that one bad winter could
trigger an agricultural disaster. California’s almond crop would
be hit particularly hard, since the state supplies 80 percent of
the world’s almonds.

Pollinating California’s 760,000 acres of
almond fields requires 1.5 million out-of-state bee colonies,
which makes up 60 percent of the country’s beehives. The CCD is a
major threat to this $4 billion industry.

Entomologists suspect that a number of other factors also
contribute to the CCD, including climate change, habitat
destructing and handling practices that expose bees to foreign
pathogens. But the effect of agricultural chemicals is
particularly alarming, especially since the US does not have laws
banning the use of the pesticides that are affecting bee health.

“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we
have led to believe,” vanEngelsdorp said. “It’s a lot more
complicated than just one product, which means of course the
solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Ohio takes the cake again on Activist Post by being a state that defends bank robbers - that is banks who rob.

Katie Barnett of McArthur came home a few weeks ago to find everything
in the house gone. She eventually discovered that First National bank
mistakenly foreclosed the wrong house -- but kept her stuff. Not only
did they clear everything out like the Grinch, but they changed the
locks. Their actual foreclosure target had been the house across the
street.

This matters not to the bank president who responded to her $18,000 estimate for wrongfully stolen goods with a firm:

We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is.

But they make no attempt for remedy and the actual translation is: Oops, nothing we can do now. (Without the Oops)

Barnett says:

I did not tell them to come in my house and make me an offer. They took my stuff and I want it back.

Now, I’m just angry... It wouldn’t be a big deal if they would step up
and say ‘I’m sorry, we will replace your stuff.’ Instead, I’m getting
attitude from them. They’re sarcastic when they talk to me. They make it
sound like I’m trying to rip the bank off. All I want is my stuff back.

Additionally, the police chief closed the case!

Katie remains without any of her things and no compensation for theft
and damages. All they really told her is that they sent someone to
possess the correct house and GPS led the person to the wrong address -
the lawn hadn't been mowed so they "just assumed" and broke in. All her
items were taken, some were sold, given away or trashed! How can this
situation be truly remedied; and if she quoted retail prices, what's
wrong with that, as the only way to get them back is to buy again? What
of irreplaceable items like heirlooms and multi-generational family
albums?

10TV News reports that the bank president wishes to come to terms with
Barnett, but so far nothing indicates restitution for this blaring
offense.

A lot of people prepare for various reasons, even insulating from
possible job loss and economic downturns. Imagine working hard,
preparing and then having the bank clear your home with the protection
of the town's police chief.

Gasland 2,
the sequel to Josh Fox's documentary about the dangers of hydraulic
fracturing for natural gas, introduces a frightening image.

It's not another money shot of tap water on fire, though the water well hose lit up by the owner of a multimillion dollar home in Parker County, Texas is a wonder.

Nor is the most frightening image an internal gas industry memo labeling
residents of small towns in Pennsylvania or New York State an
"insurgency" that must be put down with PSYOPS techniques honed by the military in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most frightening image in Gasland 2 is a map of the United States covered with potential fracking sites.

The United States of Fracking

Look at the map. It's hard to find a state whose water supply doesn't
originate in or cross through a place that the industry would like to
frack.

So what? The U.S. government says that fracking can be done without harm
to groundwater. And the industry claims that no study has ever proven
that fracking has contaminated one single water supply.

Don't believe them, says Fox, with plenty of science to back him up. Using that science, the Gasland 2 website gives a clear answer to the question "Is fracking safe?"

No. Fracking, as currently practiced across the United States, poses
serious risks to the health and safety of communities and the
environment.

Water supplies across the country have been contaminated by fracking. There have been multiple documented cases where natural gas, or methane, has migrated out of wells and into underground aquifers.
The fracking process also forces gallons of chemically-treated water
into the ground along with numerous byproducts including chemicals,
naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs), dissolved solids,
liquid hydrocarbons including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and
xylene, and heavy metals.

Wanna be a farmer? Fuggedaboutit.

The implications of fracking America go far beyond whether your natural
gas bill stays low or some bedraggled folks in flyover states get
somewhat more bedgraggled because they have to have their drinking water
trucked in.

Rural areas have had it tough for decades, losing family farms to
industrial agriculture, losing Main Street shops to Walmart and losing
young people to the allure of the big city. Yet these days, judging by
all the back-to-the-landers, homesteaders and greenhorns fleeing
corporate cubicles for fields of produce and pigs, you'd think that
rural America was on the verge of a renaissance, ready to step up and
provide the nation with wholesome food, natural carbon sequestration and
a sense of community that our alienated citizenry yearns for.

Then - bam! - enter the frackers to put the kabbash on this happy ending
and put rural areas back in their place as sacrifice zones for
polluting industries.

By contaminating water supplies from sea to shining sea, the industry's
final desperate gambit to keep the fossil fuel party going for a few
more years could render much of rural America uninhabitable. As
despoiled rural communities shut down, families will have no choice but
to seek housing and work in the city. And the cruel joke at the end of
it all is that natural gas may turn out to be a bubble,
with fracking ruining millions of acres of perfectly good land for only
a few years of gas supply. The wells may run dry in five or ten years
and the drillers will take the money and run. But the pollution will
remain for decades.

Meanwhile, urban escapees will have to forget their dreams of moving to a
rural area, buying a little farm and building a self-sufficient
homestead. If fracking renders large areas of countryside unfit for
sustainable farming, not to mention plain old human habitation,
disaffected downtown office workers may have little choice but to stay
in their cubicles, shut up and do their work - at least until the next
round of layoffs.

Making the world safe for frack-ocracy

An image nearly as scary as the U.S. map is a corresponding map of the
world showing shale plays that industry would like to sink its teeth
into.

But don't think the Obama Administration, which touts natural gas as a
clean fuel that will help reduce climate emissions, is just sitting
around waiting for other nations to get into fracking. Fortunately for top U.S. gas drillers
such as ExxonMobil, Chesapeake Energy and Anadarko, the administration
has recruited the U.S. taxpayer to help pry open reluctant markets like
Poland and India through the State Department's Global Shale Gas
Initiative (now known as the Unconventional Gas Technical Engagement Program).

Watch the Gasland 2 trailer. Then, find a screening near you or get a copy of the DVD to watch at home.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

A disappearing North American bumblebee species has reemerged in
Washington state, stunning scientists and conservationists who long
feared that “Beemageddon” would cause the collapse of the agriculture
industry.

The Bombus occidentalis, also known as the Western Bumble Bee,
has disappeared from half of its natural range, but was recently
spotted among the flowers of a park north of Seattle, Reuters
reports.

Multiple sightings of the vanishing bee, including several
queens, have instilled new hope that it could make a comeback in
the Pacific Northwest.

“It gives us hope that we can do some conservation work, and
perhaps the species has a chance at repopulating its range,”
Rich Hatfield, a biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate
Conservation, told Reuters, noting that the sightings are “a
pretty big deal.”
The Western Bumble Bee vanished from parts of the US more than a
decade ago. Since their disappearance, the first sighting in
Washington state occurred last year, when an insect enthusiast
found such a bee in her garden. Earlier this month, Will
Peterman, a 42-year-old freelance writer and photographer,
captured photos of the Bombus occidentalis searching for nectar
in a park in Brier.

Peterman returned to the park with a group of entomologists
on Sunday, and took additional photos of some of the
queen bees. He described the scientists’ mood as “almost
giddy” and “optimistic”.
Scientists have attributed bumblebee declines to parasites,
pesticides and habit fragmentation. Hatfield believes a deadly
fungus might have contributed to the decline of the Bombus
occidentalis. He now wonders whether the species has developed a
resistance to this fungus, thereby repopulating the Pacific
Northwest.

Bees are crucial for the agriculture industry, since they
pollinate crops such as tomatoes, cranberries, almonds, apples,
zucchinis, avocados and plums. More than 100 types of US crops,
valued at more than $200 billion each year, rely on bees to
pollinate them.

A recent University of California study conducted by Berry J.
Brosi, an assistant professor, and Heather M. Briggs, a graduate
student, also found that the loss of bees could threaten certain
types of plants and flower species that rely on pollination to
produce their seeds.

The honey bee population has taken a particularly hard toll. The
US is currently home to about 2.5 million honey bee colonies,
which is a drastic decrease from the 6 million that existed in
1947 and the 3 million that existed in 1990.

Bumblebees have also faced dwindling populations, and an
estimated 50,000 bees died in an
Oregon parking lot in June, just days before National Pollinator
Week.

“Bees across the country are not in as good a shape as last
year,” Eric Mussen, a University of California bee
specialist, told the Christian Science Monitor. But with
the reemergence of the Bombus occidentalis in Washington state,
“Beemageddon” might be delayed.

Dignity of Man versus Crude Old Antiquated Failed System of War, Greed, and Power

This week we learned that Detroit is filing for bankruptcy,
the largest in US history for any city, and its’ calling into question
everything we are doing.

Is American patriotism exaggerated? What is the real state of welfare
in the US? Can the country afford its democracy promotion effort? And,
is it possible that America is becoming a third world country?

Check out what Peter Lavelle is saying on Cross Talk with George Szamuely and Charles Blair.

To me, nothing wakes up a person more than failure. But can that very
human trait wake up a country and a world who is failing to meet the
challenge?

As the USA continues its 30 year decline teetering on a 3rd world
status whilst its government continues to support global corporations
who do not necessarily have the peoples interest at heart, its getting
down to crunch time where we are going to be forced to examine
everything from the system of government, the economy, the wisdom of
capitalism, and even how we structure our communities on main street;
namely the failure of suburb planning to bring peoples together.

Paradise or Oblivion, by The Venus Project,
introduces the viewer to a more appropriate value system that would be
required to enable this caring and holistic approach to benefit human
civilization. This alternative surpasses the need for a monetary-based,
controlled, and scarcity-oriented environment, which we find ourselves
in today.

Editor's note: Lisa has hit the nail on the head. Everyone talks about gloom and doom as a form of labeling anyone who doesn't absorb the idiosyncrasy of living the gloomy life of eating synthetic chemicals, and the actual doom that results. Isn't that what this process describes? As we currently understand no one has ever been healed and these are all unnatural processes which feed the brave new world of corporatism.

RT- Researchers are fervently at work, creating more and more pills to fix a
wide variety of issues. Researchers in Florida are working on a pill
that could supposedly replace exercise; there is a pill to take so you
won't have to remember passwords in the works; there are pills that can
be taken instead of using sun screen and bug spray. We are obsessed with
taking pills. The Resident (aka Lori Harfenist) discusses.

Monday, July 22, 2013

JAPAN – A
strong vulcanian explosion occurred last night at 11:02 GMT (20:02
local time), following several hours of near complete calm at the
volcano. A loud cannon-shot bang accompanied the explosion, which
generated a large mushroom cloud that reached 12,000 ft (3.7 km)
altitude and engulfed the NE half of the Sakurajima peninsula and was
followed by several smaller ones within about half an hour. The volcano
and much of the surrounding areas remained under the ash plume for
several hours until it started to clear up again. In the hours after the
explosion, the Showa crater continued to emit ash plumes in often
near-continuous pulses, sometimes reaching several 100 m height, but
with no visible incandescence or audible sounds. –Volcano Discovery

Large explosions at Ecuador volcano: An
increase of activity occurred yesterday. IGPEN recorded 3 strong pulses
of volcanic tremor since midnight 20-21 July (local time), which were
accompanied by strombolian activity and strong explosions that produced
loud roars, heavy gunfire sounds, and vibrations that rattled floors,
windows and doors of houses in areas nearby. Some were heard even in the
Tungurahua Volcano Observatory (OVT), located 14 km north of the
volcano. The largest explosion yesterday at 14h18 (local time) generated
an eruption column of 5 km height moving east. Although so far there
have been no new pyroclastic flows, this could likely happen in the near
future. Ash fall occurred in the area of ​​Manzano, Choglontus,
Tisaleo, Cevallos and Mapayacu. In between the explosions, constant
strombolian activity with the ejection of incandescent bombs, some of
which rolled down the slopes could be seen at night. The explosions
caused considerable damage to some of the monitoring instruments (solar
panels, cameras etc.). –Volcano Discovery

Sometimes even worse than having a mysterious illness is the fact that
no one in the medical profession believes that you have this illness.
Or, still worse than that, they don’t believe that the illness even
exists.

Imagine being desperately ill and having your doctor tell you that it’s
all in your head. Imagine being so incredibly ill that you are wasting
away in front of your family’s eyes, and having your physician prescribe
you psychiatric medications. Imagine that in your search for answers,
you spend every penny you have and you still don’t have a diagnosis.
Imagine being poisoned by your food, your air, your dentist, and the
very medications that are supposed to be helping you.

Imagine being a victim of an instant-food, good-smelling, clean-looking toxic society.

MCS is the result of such a vast chemical overload
that a person’s bodily functions begin to shut down. Because it is not
recognized by the medical profession, research is limited. Since the
answer is the avoidance of chemicals instead of the introduction of more
chemicals (pills) Big Pharma has a vested interest in keeping this a
non-diagnosis.

Toxins that we in the “civilized world” are exposed to on a daily basis
can cause flare-ups that lead to hospitalization, disability, and death.
Many who suffer from this condition become self-isolated in an effort
to avoid exposure to substances like smoke, pesticides, plastics,
synthetic fabric, scented items, chemical additives in food,
preservatives, products made from petroleum, and noxious fumes from
paint or cleaning products. Check out the following video to learn more
about MCS, an shocking issue that has only arisen in the past few
decades as our environment become more and more toxic.

A dubious Wikipedia entry
lists the following as alternative names for MCS: toxic injury (TI),
chemical sensitivity (CS), chemical injury syndrome (CI), 20th century
syndrome, environmental illness (EI), sick building syndrome, idiopathic
environmental intolerance (IEI), and toxicant-induced loss of tolerance
(TILT). Gulf War Syndrome and Food Intolerance Syndrome are also
considered by some to be a form of MCS.

According to Dr. Mercola, many of the chemicals that we are exposed to
on a daily basis never leave our bodies, but accumulate in fat and bone
marrow. He writes:

The sheer number of toxic chemicals that you
are exposed to on a daily basis is truly staggering. With some 100,000
different chemicals being used throughout the world, and 1,500 or so
more being added each year – all without any major oversight or testing
for safety until after the fact – is it any wonder that you’re not as healthy as you should be?

The
number of toxic chemicals is so large, addressing them all would be an
impossible mission, but I believe being an informed and vigilant
consumer CAN help you keep your toxic load as low as possible, even if
it may be impossible to cut your exposure to zero.

After
all, they’re everywhere; in your air, water, soil, food supply, and in a
vast majority of the personal care, household and yard products you use
on a regular basis. Today, they’re even in the circuitry boards of the
electronics you surround yourself with. Some of the sources of toxins
you have control over. Others, you don’t. (Click HERE to read Dr. Mercola’s tips on avoiding chemical overload)

Recently I wrote an article called The Great American Genocide,
in which I discussed how the toxins we are exposed to on a daily basis
are making us sick, setting up our children for infertility, and
inevitably bringing us to an early death. I received an email from a
victim of these toxins who has lost everything. I am republishing here
(with permission) because it’s time that we, as a society, stop putting
our fingers in our ears and singing “Lalalalala” in an effort to drown
out the stories from victims like this.

My name is Kim and I have had direct horrible
life trauma due to environment and chemical poisoning because of what is
being done in this country.

About
11 years ago I was eating a burger from McDonald and cracked a back
molar on a piece of bone in the burger, that tooth had previously been
“fixed” with an amalgam (mercury) filling. Well after it broke it didn’t
really hurt and I didn’t have insurance so I never got it fixed. About a
year later I starting having what I was told was panic attacks and
anxiety issues (I much later found out that was not the issue).

After
about 5 years of dealing with progressively worse “anxiety” it got to
the point where I would randomly feel so ill I couldn’t even leave the
house. Finally in February of 2010 I woke up one day and felt like
someone punched me in the stomach. It was so horrible and I just
couldn’t shake the pain – I saw my doctor multiple times and they told
me it was all anxiety related.

I
realized after about two weeks of being so sick I could barely move with
constant “panic attacks” that it would get worse every time I ate. So I
immediately switch to something that would not upset my stomach like
yogurt and bread. I ate just that for months – all the while my doctors
were telling me it was all in my head and there was nothing wrong with
my stomach. Over the last 3 years my diet varied slightly but as things
got worse I was basically limited to a diet of white rice and chicken
noodle soup (without the chicken) for the last two years. I saw 28
doctors in this time period who diagnosed me with all kinds of issues
(all of them stemming from the root cause but no one able to tell me
what that was)

Not only was I actually having allergic
reactions to food, not panic attacks, but I started having them to
touching things and smells as well. In January of this year I finally
found a doctor that knew a little bit about what was going on with me
and put me on many supplements – which have helped a lot. Right before I
found that doctor I spent 4 days in the hospital because I couldn’t
breathe (especially while trying to have a BM) and after they checked my
heart they told me I was fine and to leave the hospital. When I begged
the doctor not to make me leave because I knew I would die the doctor
told me to go see a psychologist because there was nothing wrong with
me.

Just this last Thursday I
finally found an alternative medicine doctor/integrated medicine doctor
that gave me all the answers I was looking for. After some tests I found
out a few things:

I have
mercury poisoning – slowly leaking into my body every day for the last
11 years and more recently when I had a child during all this, my
nutrition was so depleted that 3 more teeth broke down so I now have 4
fillings leaking into my body daily.

Because of the extreme poisoning it has broken down the lining of my
stomach to the point where I have “leaky gut syndrome” or permeated
stomach lining. All that time they told me I was having panic attacks
and trying to put me on drugs it was actually food escaping into my body
from my stomach and my body attacking it as a foreign invader. I’m
lucky I never went into shock and it killed me.

So since my stomach lining was already weak, all the chemicals in
our food/environment have caused me to develop Multiple chemical
sensitivity, continued to deteriorate my stomach lining so I have a
chronic Yeast infection in my stomach, my body is so over loaded by
toxins that my liver and lymphatic system can barely push any of them
out anymore and that by itself causes a whole host of other issues.

Not to mention the mercury that has accumulated in my body/brain is causing symptoms like Alzheimer and I’m only 31 years old.

It will probably take years to rebuild my stomach, fix my teeth,
clean all the mercury out of my body, and eliminate all the toxins, etc
but at least now I know what is going on and I’m on the right track.

Unfortunately, my out of pocket medical costs have bankrupted my family –
literally since we were just evicted and are now living in a hotel with
two of our four daughters. With that said I have made it my personal
mission to destroy everyone and everything that contributed to this
issue – from the bad food we so unknowingly consume, the products we use
daily that are filled with cancer causing agents and other harmful
products, the western medicine doctors that trying to treat all symptoms
with a pill instead of fixing the root cause of the issue, etc.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
defines MCS: The preferred medical term is Idiopathic Environmental
Intolerance (IEI), which can be defined as a “chronic, recurring disease
caused by a person’s inability to tolerate an environmental chemical or
class of foreign chemicals.” The site lists the following criteria
for a diagnosis:

Symptoms are reproducible with repeated (chemical) exposures.

The condition is chronic.

Low levels of exposure (lower than previously or commonly tolerated)
result in manifestations of the syndrome (i.e. increased sensitivity).

The symptoms improve, or resolve completely, when the triggering chemicals are removed.

To avoid being poisoned is to be labeled a kook, the one at office
parties and family events who brings their own food, the target of sighs
and eye rolls. It is being the one who makes her own soap and cleaning
products. It is being that person who avoids so many of the things
that are part of everyday life in America that she becomes an outcast.
We, in the “civilized world”, seem to be intent on being complicit in
our own demise, paying our hard-earned money to inhale toxins and
pollutants, to consume chemical concoctions instead of food, and to
slather poison on our bodies to be introduced into our systems through
the pores in our skin.

Whether you believe this is deliberate depopulation or careless
disregard in the pursuit of the almighty dollar, there is little
question that we are all victims of a toxic civilization.

This is our future, and no amount of cognitive dissonance, no loudly stated refusal to believe it, will make it go away.

Credit: Thank you, Kim, for sharing you story. May God bless you and your family.

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